


Last Temptation

by merle_p



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Feels, Caretaking, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Confessions, Episode: s08e21 The Great Escapist, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mutual Pining, Past Lucifer/Sam Winchester (Brief Mention), Past Rape/Non-con (Brief Mention), Possessive Dean Winchester, Protective Dean Winchester, Sibling Incest, Sick Sam Winchester, Trials, Voicemail (Fix-it)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:42:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29558595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merle_p/pseuds/merle_p
Summary: Sam is running a fever again, the kind of fever no Ibuprofen or cold compress will bring down, the kind of fever that is eating him up alive, eviscerating him from the inside. He is too hot and too cold and too pale, delirious and shaking, resonating with whatever divine energy the trials are subjecting him to, and Dean is not sure how much longer he can stand to see him be in this state.Because Sam is quite possibly dying, and there is nothing Dean can do to stop it. Because Sam is dying, and he just. Won’t. Shut. Up.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 35
Kudos: 342
Collections: Every Time We Touch: A First-Time Wincest Fest





	Last Temptation

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after the conversation with Metatron at the Two Rivers Hotel in Colorado in 8.21 The Great Escapist.

Dean wants nothing more than to pack his giant little brother and their tiny little prophet into the car and get the hell out of Dodge, put as many miles as possible between the backlights of the Impala and this spooky hotel with its empty hallways and its glowering receptionist and Metatron sitting in his room full of books like a big hairy spider lurking in its web.

But Kevin is still a little shaken after he got almost killed by Crowley and then teleported at the last moment across the United States by the guy claiming to be God’s scribe, and Sam looks like he might collapse if an ant as much as breathes on him, and so Dean resigns himself to sticking around for another night before making the long drive home.

And rationally he knows he has made the right decision, knows he himself was in no condition to spend nine hours behind the wheel after the day they just had, but that doesn’t mean he can’t wish he was back in the bunker, or on the road, or really anywhere but here, because he can imagine few things worse right now than being stuck in this bleak, musty hotel room with his ailing brother who is doing his best impression of a consumptive Victorian heroine.

Sam is running a fever again, the kind of fever no Ibuprofen or cold compress will bring down, the kind of fever that is eating him up alive, _eviscerating_ him from the inside. He is too hot and too cold and too pale, delirious and shaking, _resonating_ with whatever divine energy the trials are subjecting him to, and Dean is not sure how much longer he can stand to see him be in this state.

Because Sam is quite possibly dying, and there is nothing Dean can do to stop it. Because Sam is dying, and he just. Won’t. Shut. Up.

“Hey, remember when –“

“Dean, do you remember –“

“When we were little –“

Sam’s brain keeps spitting up bits and pieces of ancient memories, like a malfunctioning garbage disposal, and it is as if he needs, _needs_ to share each one with Dean to make room in his brain for the next one that is already bubbling up in his confused, exhausted mind.

There is no rhyme or reason to the stories that are spilling from Sam’s dry, blue-tinged lips. Ridiculous trivial anecdotes are followed by Earth-shattering declarations are followed by stories that Dean has absolutely no recollection of – it is like the worst kind of emotional rollercoaster, and there is no way to get off the ride.

And instead of pulling off his shoes and turning to the wall and putting a pillow over his head to finally get some much-needed rest, Dean sits and hovers and listens because he is terrified that the moment Sam actually stops talking, he might fall asleep and just never wake up again.

“Hey,” Sam says from the bathroom, where he just barely manages to hold his own dick and tuck himself back in before he has to reach for the doorframe, clinging to the wood to keep himself upright until Dean comes to walk him back to the bed.

“Hey,” Sam repeats, tangling feeble fingers in Dean’s sleeve, “remember that day when we were on the road in Arizona, and Dad refused to stop, and I peed my pants in the car?”

He falls back onto the covers the moment Dean deposits him on the edge of the bed, curls up on his side like he used to when he was a kid, and Dean feels something inside him crack wide open at the sight. 

“Dad was so furious,” Sam laughs softly, soundlessly. “He pulled over on the shoulder and made us get out of the car, and I thought he was going to leave me there. Put you into the backseat and take off without me.”

Dean drags a hand over his aching eyes and remembers. Remembers helping Sam change into a fresh pair of pants at the side of the road, stuffing wet clothes into a plastic grocery bag, Dad in the car with his hands clenched into fists on the wheel, and Sam – four, maybe five years old – looking anxious and humiliated, saying “Sorry, sorry, Dean, I’m sorry” over and over again. Remembers Dad stopping at the next gas station to buy Skittles and beef jerky, a wordless apology, remembers eating the jerky all by himself while Sam was curled up against the door in the backseat of the car, silently watching the landscape pass by. Remembers feeding the Skittles to Sam that night, one by one, in the darkness of a motel room while Dad was snoring on the other side of the room.

“He would never have left you, Sam,” is what he says, sitting on the second bed, hands hanging limp between his knees. “We wouldn’t have just left you there.”

Sam looks at him from glassy eyes and says: “Sometimes I thought he should have,” and Dean forgets how to breathe.

“Do you remember,” Sam says, later, and Dean winces inwardly, steeling himself for the next brutal attack on the battered, bleeding lump that is his heart.

He has listened to Sam talk about the ugly-cute neighborhood cat at a motel in Wyoming that kept sneaking into their room and made Dean sneeze. He has listened to the story of how Sam, soulless, once slit open a dead werewolf’s belly and dug around the intestines with his bare hands to retrieve a key the man had swallowed before dying, and how their grandfather left the room to throw up behind the cabin and didn’t look at Sam quite the same way afterwards for a while. He has listened to Sam confess how sometimes, in the cage, Lucifer pretended to make sweet love to him in between rounds of torture, and how that fake, poisonous tenderness was worse than having his tongue ripped out with red-hot pliers, and Dean had to get up and stand by the door with his back turned for a minute so he wouldn’t throw up himself.

Now he is crouching on the mattress, coaxing Sam to suck on an ice cube he retrieved from the dispenser down the hall. In the back of his mind, he can hear Sam’s voice listing concerns about sanitary standards and water quality, but he drowns them out, telling himself that he can start worrying about coliforms once his brother is not at risk of death from dehydration anymore.

Sam humors him, lets Dean pry his mouth open just a little, his tongue lapping half-heartedly at the ice cube and Dean’s fingertips, but a moment later he turns his head away, lips slack and slick, a single drop of water trailing down his chin. 

“The message you left me, before – before I killed Lilith, remember?” he rasps, and Dean drops the melting ice cube back into the plastic cup and closes his eyes. Because yes, oh yes, he remembers, but he would give everything for not having to think about this, doesn’t want to go back to the days when he was scared to death of losing Sam to the most vicious of addictions, out of his mind with worry and heartache as he watched Sam getting slowly ground up between the wheels of heavenly ambitions and hellish schemes.

“We talked about this,” he says gruffly, wipes his cold, wet fingers on his jeans. “I told you that wasn’t me,” and that, right there, is another thing he hates to think about, the knowledge that his brother had walked around for years believing that Dean had given up on him, that Dean had called him a monster, a freak. And Dean hadn’t _known_ , had only found out when Sam was dangerously sleep-deprived and delusional, rehashing what sounded like an old argument with the hallucination of freaking Lucifer in a motel room somewhere at four in the morning while Dean had felt the ground under his feet crumble like a sinkhole with every word his brother said.

“Yes, but Dean –“ Sam starts quietly and no, no, Dean can’t take this again, the doubt in Sam’s eyes, the confused suspicion, the uncertainty, not right now.

“It wasn’t me, Sam,” he bites out, digs his fingernails into his thighs through the fabric of his pants, and Sam reaches for him, paws at him aimlessly, palm on Dean’s forearm, on his thigh, his knee, until his hand slips off Dean’s leg, drops back onto the bedspread.

“I didn’t know, Dean,” he says softly, “I didn’t know, and when I heard your message, I thought. I thought maybe you had finally seen it, you know, maybe Zachariah had shown you –“

“Shown me what?” Dean asks roughly, feeling lost, but Sam can’t seem to hear him, continues as if Dean hasn’t spoken at all.

“And I was thinking,” he says, “I was thinking that maybe, if Dad had left me back there in Arizona, you wouldn’t have had to find out how I felt. If I’d never seen you again, I would never have – you know? I would’ve never …”

“What are you talking about,” Dean says helplessly, brushes sweat-matted hair away from Sam’s burning forehead with shaking fingers, a silly, pointless gesture, feels like he might cry when Sam turns his head towards the touch, hiding his face in the curve of Dean’s palm.

“… the tires, remember?” Sam says against Dean’s hand, and Dean jerks upright, feels the bottom of his stomach drop out when he realizes that he must have dozed off sitting up at some point. His fingers have gone numb under the pressure of Sam’s cheekbone, Sam’s skin is hot and damp against his palm. He feels disoriented, doesn’t know how long he has been asleep – five minutes, an hour – and Sam is still talking, and perhaps has been talking this whole time.

He puts his other hand on Sam’s shoulder, tries to roll him over to free his arm, feels Sam’s shirt sticking to his body, clammy, soaked with sweat.

“Jesus,” he swears, “come on, we got to get you out of this stuff.”

Sam blinks up at him from bleary eyes, and doesn’t resist, doesn’t help, just lets Dean move him around like a rag doll, a giant, 200-pound rag doll, and Dean unbuttons his brother’s shirt, drowns out Sam’s ramblings about the bathroom tile patterns at the bunker, thinks instead of all the times he has done this before: Sam at two, every time he spilled his milk all over himself. Sam at six, covered in rust stains and engine grease after playing between the old cars in Bobby’s yard. Sam at fifteen, unconscious and drenched in toxic mud after their encounter with the weird swamp creature in Louisiana. Sam at twenty-three – _God_ –, cold and stiff, the expanse of his back caked in a sticky layer of dirt and blood. Sam at …

Dean shakes his head, blinks tears out of his eyes, lifts Sam’s arms, one by one, to slide the flannel off his shoulders, strips his jeans off next, registers with a twinge just how easily they slide off his brother’s hips when he undoes the belt.

“You know,” Sam starts when Dean pulls the sheets up over his mile-long, skinny, trembling legs, “you know when the school counselor kept me behind after class in middle school? We were in Michigan that fall.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, gets up to deposit Sam’s clothes on the second bed, then comes back to sit on the mattress next to his brother, because Sam’s voice has been getting weaker and Dean may not want to hear half the things Sam is saying, but not being able to hear him would be worse.

“Yeah, she kept you in there for two hours,” he says, drags his fingers through his hair. “I was waiting for you in the parking lot, and the janitor kept throwing me looks. You – ah,” he squeezes his eyes shut, tries to recall more details. Dean had been getting impatient, ready to chew Sam out for the delay, grill him about what happened, but when Sam had eventually shuffled out of the building, shoulders drawn up to his ears, he’d looked so withdrawn, so closed-off, that Dean accepted Sam’s weak excuse about how some kids had pushed him in the yard (as if Sam wasn’t perfectly capable of killing arrogant middle-school bullies with his bare hands), because he had been hit by the sudden, irrational fear that if he prodded him too much, Sam might fade away into nothing, crumble and disappear under his hands.

Now, here, Sam is so pale, so translucent, that he once again looks like he is on the brink of evanescence as he glances up at Dean from half-lidded eyes, the corner of his mouth twitching with a brittle, twisted, weird little thing of a smile. 

“She asked me if you were touching me,” he says, and Dean stares, thinks he must have misunderstood, thinks Sam must have misspoken, because this can’t possibly –

“ _Inappropriately_ ,” Sam adds, as if he’s citing someone else’s words from memory, and Dean considers locking himself into the bathroom, is tempted to walk out the door and get into the car, because this can’t be happening, they can’t be having this conversation, not now, not after so many years.

But leaving is not an option, so he doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t breathe, and Sam is still smiling that strange, warped little smile.

“The PE teacher reported the bruises,” he says, and his voice is barely more than a whisper now, but there’s an odd quality to his tone, as if Sam finds this story mildly amusing in some bizarre, horrific kind of way. “And people had seen you pick me up after school, said you looked …” He huffs, more a shaky exhale than a chuckle. “Controlling. And … she wanted to make sure that I was safe.”

Dean feels sick. _Why didn’t you tell me_ , he wants to ask, although what he would have done if Sam had brought it up, he isn’t sure; but Sam is already talking again, with no regard for the fact that Dean is suffocating under an avalanche of decades-old guilt.

“She asked if I was being taken advantage of,” he says, quietly. “You know what I told her? I said _No, but I wish I was_.”

“What?” Dean asks tonelessly, feels the room tilt around him, thinks, _Christ_ , _Sammy_ , and Sam is still talking.

“She let me go then,” he says softly. “She didn’t know what to say. I think I scared her. Kind of funny, huh?”

“Sam –“ Dean chokes out, doesn’t know how to continue, and Sam reaches up then, curls his fingers around Dean’s jaw, traces Dean’s cheekbone with his thumb, touch feather-light.

“Don’t worry, Dean,” he whispers, like he’s sharing a secret, “it’s gonna be alright. I told you, the trials will –“ He struggles to swallow, his hand slips off Dean’s face, falls back onto the sheets.

“The trials will burn it right out of me. Or they’ll kill me, and either way, you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“Jesus, shut the fuck up, Sam, what are you talking about –“ Dean grits out, half-sobs, and then he breaks off abruptly, because Sam has stopped talking at last.

Sam has finally stopped talking, but the initial, momentary relief at the blissful silence immediately makes way for a bottomless, profound kind of horror, because when Dean looks at him, in the weak light of the bedside lamp, Sam looks dead.

Dean swoops down, heart in his throat, hovers over Sam’s face, prays _no, no, no_ , finally _thinks_ he feels the hint of an exhale ghosting over his skin, but he can’t be sure, and he doesn’t know what else to do, and so he.

Presses a kiss against Sam’s mouth, careful, desperate, like Sam is Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Juliet, like a kiss could be enough to bring him back. He lingers, longer than he meant to, registers the sensation of Sam’s lips against his own, Sam's skin chapped and fever-hot. And then he feels it, a soft puff of air mingling with his own breath, Sam’s lips yielding to the pressure, and suddenly he finds that he can’t stop, covers Sam’s face in light, fleeting kisses – kisses his damp forehead, his cheekbones, his lashes, the shell of his ear, the curve of his throat, buries his face in Sam’s neck, nose in his hair – and Sam, barely conscious, rolls into him, presses against him with all the strength of a newborn kitten, and Dean sinks into the mattress, slots himself against his brother’s body, and kisses him again.

And this isn’t right, this isn’t right, he shouldn’t be doing this, not when Sam is delirious and so quiet and so weak, but he doesn’t know how to stop now that he’s started, and all he can think is that if Sam survives these trials, then Dean is going to make it right, do it right, lay him out on clean sheets and strip him down and kiss, lick, bite every inch of his body, fuck into him so thoroughly, so deeply that Sam won’t know where he ends and where Dean begins, deep enough that Sam will feel like Dean has laid claim to the space inside his body and is never, ever going to leave.

They are doomed, he thinks, as he kisses Sam’s collarbone, his Adam’s Apple, the pulse point low on his throat. They are doomed, because even if Sam is right, even if the trials were able to cleanse him of every dream, every need, every impure thought, Dean would still be there to drag Sam right back into it, to drag Sam down with him, because this is how they are, this is what they are: Sam’s soul, mind, heart have been Dean’s all along, and now that Dean has seen into Sam’s mind, now that he knows Sam wants it, he won't hesitate, won't rest until he has claimed every cell of Sam's body for himself as well.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Last Temptation | By merle_p](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29740914) by [ladygizarme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygizarme/pseuds/ladygizarme)




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